March 13th, 2024
Dear Oscar Attendees
Warning: This blog post contains disturbing content.
Dear Oscar Attendees,
We noticed that some of you were wearing red “ceasefire” pins to the Oscar ceremonies. I know you mean well. Perhaps you believe that a ceasefire will lead to peace. Setting aside whether or not I agree with you (I don’t), and never mind that you completely ignore the fact that there are innocent hostages being held in Gaza (shame on you), I think you need to know the background of the symbol of the pin you’re wearing. The red pin. The one with a red hand on it. Here’s the 411.
In October, 2000, two Israeli reservists, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yosef Avraami, were lynched in the Ramallah police station. They’d lost their way, and a local policeman brought them in to the station while a jeering blood-thirsty crowd of locals waited outside the building, below the window. Once in the station, the cop took a long pipe, bashed them first in the legs, then in the head, repeatedly beating them (according to his testimony) “until he heard them growl”.
Next, a terrorist named Abd al-Aziz Yusuf Mustafa Salahi started stabbing the first with a knife while others in the room mercilessly kicked and beat both of them. (By now, the second of the soldiers was motionless, having had the life pummeled and bludgeoned out of him.) Salahi finally strangled the soldier, then noticed that his own hands and shirt were covered in blood. So what did he do? Did he go wash his hands? Of course not. He walked over to the window and triumphantly waved his blood-red palms to the cheering crowd of people in the yard below. A photo was taken, and this became the famous image, the symbol of the Ramallah Lynching.
But that’s not all. Stay with me on this. This guy, Aziz Salahi, the murderer with the bloody, red hands, was sentenced to life in prison in 2004. Don’t breathe a sigh of relief quite yet. Seven years later, he was released under the “Shalit Deal.”
What? You don’t know what that is, dear Oscar attendees? My goodness, I thought you were all about the Middle East problem! In 2006, a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. He was held hostage for five years. In 2011, in exchange for his release, Israel released 1,027(!) prisoners, about 400 of whom were serving life sentences for the worst terrorist acts in Israel’s history.
That’s the Shalit Deal. That’s right. Abd al-Aziz Yusuf Mustafa Salahi, the guy who savagely murdered an innocent Israeli reservist and waved his bloody palms out the window, was free to again wreak havoc and cause more terror. You know who else was set free? Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, one of the key organizers of the October 7 massacre.
“But what does that have to do with my pretty little red pin, calling for a ceasefire?” I hear you ask. Well, my dear, famous, ignorant, Hollywood star, the world has changed. Just as an image of a watermelon is no longer just a watermelon, a red palm is so much more than that. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s merely Palestinians wanting peace. Oh, no. It is an emblem of that bloody hand, a reminder of the Ramallah lynching and a call for “death to the Israelis”. It is the worst symbol of Arab-Israeli relations.
So please. Stick to acting. Or directing. Or singing. Or whatever glorious talent you have that entertains the rest of us. Unless you want to speak up to get the hostages home, please leave the Middle-East situation alone. Let Israel do what it needs to, and maybe one day this world will be safer for all of us.
Am Yisrael Chai!